In Afghan effort, wins and losses recounted
US teams seek order, good will
GARDEZ, Afghanistan -- They arrived in December 2002 to do what had never been done : bring remote, unruly Paktia province under the control of a central Afghan government.
The half-dozen US Army reservists in the initial team had not been given any special handbook or training. They were simply told "Do not fail -- Failure is not an option," recalled First Sergeant Daniel Gill, a juvenile-corrections officer from Minnesota.
Gill's group went on to set up the first Provincial Reconstruction Team -- loosely modeled after the "Provincial Advisory Teams" of the Vietnam War -- a concept that has become a cornerstone of the US strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No comprehensive study has ever been done to assess the impact of PRTs, and no common criteria define them. But the history of this first team in Gardez, recounted in interviews with nearly a dozen former PRT members and independent analysts, illustrates both the successes and the failures of the model.
Former members recall hard-fought victories, such as turning on the electricity for the first time in seven years and convincing local leaders to agree to open a special educational center for women. But they also recount seemingly insurmountable challenges, including language barriers, mistrust caused by US bombings, and Afghan bureaucracy that they had only begun to master by the time their tours of duty were up.
Now, Afghanistan has 25 PRTs, more than half of which are run and staffed by other countries. In Iraq, where US officials are desperately trying to build local government capacity and quell violence, the model has evolved rapidly. In January, President Bush doubled the number of teams there, to 20, in concert with his military surge.
But that first team in Gardez began as an experiment, said Colonel Michael Stout, deputy commander for the 352 Civil Affairs Command, who is credited with helping to develop the PRT concept for Afghanistan in 2002.
"We were trying to figure out what were those high-payoff areas or projects," Stout said.
He said Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, was chosen because warlords were battling one another in the streets, and the central government needed to impose order. Gill's team arrived early to build a simple headquarters for roughly 80 other PRT members who would assist the new Afghan governor in the province with everything from reconstructing schools to battling corruption. But during that first severe winter, simply staying alive was a job.
For months, they lived without running water, eating military ready-to-eat meals and ramen noodles and heating their huts with locally-purchased propane stoves. They were frequently bombarded by rockets fired by mysterious enemies.
Army Colonel Anthony Hunter, a Missouri police officer who served as PRT commander in Gardez from the summer of 2003 to 2004, said his team faced a "steep learning curve."
Locals sought him out for everything from moderating centuries-old tribal disputes to mosque repairs to land rights issues. He asked the Afghan governor to handle most of those decisions, he said. Solutions were not easy to come by. Even requests for funding proved complicated, as each source -- USAID, military funds, and World Bank grants -- came with its own set of rules and restrictions.
Often the Gardez PRT would have to use its scarce resources for "Band-Aid" operations -- projects that tried to rebuild good will after US raids or bombs had eroded it.
"A lot of times, [Special Forces] would go out in an operation and destroy a well, and we'd have to go out and fix it, and mend relations," Hunter said.
Still, by the summer of 2003, the PRT was trying to help set up a functioning government. When the Afghan governor asked for help with the electric generators, Gill said, the PRT sent an engineer, start-up fuel, and advice on setting up a system to collect payments from customers.
"It was an incredible sight to look over the wall one night at the compound in what was usually darkness and see a city of lights," wrote Gill in an e-mail from Kosovo, where he is currently deployed.
Major Mark Donlin, a reservist who had worked as a performance improvement analyst in private industry in Minnesota, arrived in the summer of 2003. He said he focused on making sure that government employees were working and getting paid. When the person in charge of garbage pick up complained that he had no truck, Donlin said he convinced the man to begin with a wheelbarrow. When teachers complained they were not getting paid, Donlin said he brought it up with Afghan officials, and the problem was corrected.
"It was a performance-improvement guy's dream," he said. "It was little stories like that, but a thousand of them."
But even these positive experiences highlight a key limitation of the PRTs: Most members spend only nine months or less on the ground -- too short a time to complete complex projects. With each rotation, an entirely new team arrives when the old team returns home.
Donlin said he spent months convincing local leaders to allow a women's educational center and securing funding and permits, but had to leave before it was built. He said he hopes the Americans who replaced him completed the project, but does not know whether it went forward.
A women's education center was eventually built in Gardez three years later, by USAID, but it is unclear whether Donlin's preparations were used, according to US Army Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Tableman, PRT commander from April 2005 to May 2006. Tableman said his own team worked to electrify more of the town using a generator donated by the World Bank. He, too, said his group tried to help set up a system to collect from customers, unaware of the efforts of the previous PRT.
Tableman, a retired logistics director for
"Relationships are very important with the Afghans," he said. "Continuity is part of that."
By late 2005, the Taliban's resurgence began to worry many in the US and Afghan governments. Advocates of PRTs began to promote them as a tool for counter-insurgency. Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, brought the concept to Iraq when he was transferred there.
"A big part of solving an insurgency is for people to feel that the government extends out to their area and takes care of their needs," Tableman said.
But Chris Mason, a former State Department official who served in the Sharan PRT in Afghanistan, said there are not enough teams to neutralize an insurgency. To do that, he said, hundreds more should be dispatched, to have one in every troubled district, as there were in Vietnam.
"There is one PRT for every one million Pashtuns living in the stone age in Afghanistan," he said. "They have had no strategic impact at all."
Mason, now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Advanced Defense Studies, also said that covert counter-terrorism operations by "Special Operating Forces" -- or SOF -- who operate independently of PRTs often did more harm than good, destroying the trust that PRTs worked to build.
"I have had PRT commanders tell me that [covert] SOF does more damage in their province in one night than they can repair in six months," he said.
In Khost, a province near Gardez, the PRT tried to counteract the insurgents by persuading the local population to report improvised explosive devices planted in the roads. It worked, said John Wade, Khost PRT commander from the spring of 2006 to 2007: The number of devices that were reported before they exploded doubled from 30 percent to more than 60 percent. But this victory led the insurgents to switch tactics, increasing their use of suicide bombs.
Still, Wade said the PRT model has made important strides. Last year -- four years after Gill's team arrived in Gardez -- the US miliary began a four-month training course for PRTs before their deployment. Hand-overs also appear to have gone more smoothly. Last year, Lieutenant Colonel Tracey Meck, PRT commander from the spring of 2006 to 2007, finally held the grand opening for the electric generator that Tableman's team struggled to get running.
Meck said she had seen a lot of progress in Gardez, despite the murder of the governor there by a suicide bomber last fall.
"I was starting to see a lot more strategic planning in the government," she said. "I think it's getting better."
